Jose Saramago Quotes

There came a time when you realized that moving on was pointless. That you took yourself with you wherever you went.

A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both.

You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.

Time is a slippery thing: lose hold of it once, and its string might sail out of your hands forever.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.

No matter how far we travel, the memories will follow in the baggage car.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

If your judgement is clouded, you must be carrying too many things which are being a burden to you.

You remember too much," my mother said to me recently. "Why hold onto all that?" And I said, "where can I put it down?

All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.

The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone.

Nobody really lives in the present.

While the mind lives in the past and the future, the body lives in the now.

When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.

You really didn't see the sadness or the longing unless you already knew it was there. But that was the trick, wasn't it? Everyone had their disappointment and their baggage; only, some people carried it in their inside pockets and not on their backs.

Because maybe, in a way, we didn't leave it behind nearly as much as we might once have thought. Because somewhere underneath, a part of us stayed like that: fearful of the world around us, and no matter how much we despised ourselves for it--unable quite to let each other go.

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel.

I know that he, Matthew Broderick, doesn't have his laundry done, and that he hasn't had a hot meal in days. That stuff weighs on my mind.

The mind exists in time, in fact the mind is time; it exists in the past and the future. And remember, time consists of only two tenses, the past and the future. The present is not part of time, the present is part of eternity.

Being with friends felt like a burden. I remember just sobbing.

I would be twenty before I learned how to be fifteen, thirty before I knew what it meant to be twenty, and now at seventy-two I have to stop myself from thinking like a man of fifty who has plenty of time ahead.